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More E3 gameplay demos and interviews, Grim Fandango cast reunited for a live reading, Telltale being sued by former CEO, Blake Hester on the man behind the parody Kaz Hirai Twitter account, why Ubisoft's partnership with HitRecord for Beyond Good and Evil 2 has upset some industry professionals and union supporters, the best indies of E3, Gameumentary documentary on Gunfire Games, PUBG developer debunks accusation of maps being "asset flips" and the problems created when a fan-base with no knowledge of development start calling things fake games and "asset flips", Dan Root on how Metroid Fusion creates fear, Jimmy Maher on the creation of Another World, The Psychology of Gaming Disorder, Dan Lowe's animation analysis of The Last of Us 2 E3 demo, Joe Veix's Oral History of Leisure Suit Larry, and more.

E3 2018 is finally here and developers from all around the globe have converged on Los Angeles to show off what they've been working on. From massive triple-A publishers to the smallest of development teams, games of all shapes and sizes are at the show. While those big-name games may garner the most excitement on press conference stages and the showfloor, it's unwise to overlook the perpetually strong stable of independent games on show at E3.

This week, CD Projekt Red finally updated the world on the state of Cyberpunk 2077, an action-RPG set in the world of the Tabletop game created by Mike Pondsmith. Behind closed doors at E3 this week, the company went on to show that the game would be a first-person RPG where players would build custom characters, decide their backstories, and dive into a crime-filled city of hackers, murderous scavengers, and vengeful corporate agents.

CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the hottest games of E3, and for good reason. The open-world RPG holds all the allure we've seen in CD Projekt Red's previous games, but is also drastically different from anything the studio has done. During E3 2018, we chatted with quest designer Patrick Mills to find out more about the game.

Cyberpunk 2077 impressed with its trailer and gameplay presentation at this E3, so much so people questioned if the game is coming to current-gen consoles. We had an interview with quest designer Patrick Mills today and broached the topic, directly asking if it might not come to this console generation.

Cyberpunk 2077's E3 demo has us incredibly impressed on several fronts. If what we saw is indicative of the final product, it will give players an unprecedented degree of choice. One option players won't always have, however, is non-violence.

Ready to take to the skies once more? Set on the Usean continent, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown’s story revolves around the Second-Continental War which takes place in the year 2019. Join the Osean Air Defense Force and get involved in conflicts that cannot simply be divided into good against evil.

Chris Zimmerman is talking about the depiction of Japan in Ghost of Tsushima, the videogame his studio Sucker Punch demoed at E3 this week. Set in 1274, during the first Mongol invasion of Japan, Tsushima finds Sucker Punch in an unusual situation: they’re an American developer making a game about Japanese history for a Japanese publisher. That relationship with Sony is key to ensuring that Sucker Punch remains respectful and accurate in its depiction of Japanese history and culture, according to Zimmerman.

In an room in need of air conditioning in the Los Angeles Convention Center last week, game developer Nate Fox held out his left hand, palm down, paused and then slapped the top of it with his right. “Do you know—[slap]—that?” he asked.

Sekiro is From Software's next game, and with that, we've noticed quite a few similarities with the Souls series. However, it sounds like Sekiro's world will be more similar to Dark Souls 1 than any other game. We talked to the developer on our E3 2018 stage.

One of the things I’m most interested in seeing about Sekiro is not the game itself but people’s developing impressions of it. Very little of it has been seen and people are already making judgments which seem culturally biased to me. For example, take this quote from a PC Game article:

The trailers and the gameplay reveals have, so far, told me that this is a game about a near-future Civil War. But it’s not a game about politics, Spier insisted. It’s a game about saving lives and bringing society back from the brink of destruction.

I feel like trying to talk to Ubisoft about their game's obvious themes and framing is like trying to get Patrick to admit that you found his wallet.

Movie tie-ins are a gamble that usually ends with a lackluster game. For every Spider-Man 2, there’s a dozen games that are clunky and not worth your time. Jurassic World Evolution falls somewhere in between. It’s not the most detailed park-building sim, but if you embrace some of its clumsiness, you’ll find yourself lost in the fantasy of being a dinosaur park mogul.

When EA Sports released the free World Cup update for FIFA 18, some players thought it played differently compared to the main game. Actually, it was more than some - there were loads of players who thought it played differently.

There were perhaps too many games at E3 2018 for any one person to have caught them all. That’s why we’re still trying to cover videos and reveals a week later. I accidentally typed “a year later” because that’s how it feels. I’m fine; we’re all fine here. One of the sleeper hits of the show on my end was Strange Brigade. I always super-dig what Rebellion puts out, but I wasn’t feeling this one before E3. Then I got to see a supernatural co-op shooter with puzzles and third-person combat in gigantic levels. Now I’m intrigued. And there’s a little bit of a Clive Barker’s Jericho vibe I’m getting here, which is equally exciting.

What happens to the gig economy once capitalism destroys us all? Well, that’s what Neo Cab sets out to answer. You play as one of the last Uber drivers is a shiny dystopia where you’ve got to keep your feelings from exploding while you engage in a quest to save someone close to you. Managing the emotional needs of your passengers along the way, and becoming invested in their lives, are the parts of the gig that you probably won’t be compensated for.

After a behind closed doors demo of The Last of Us Part II at E3 this week, we spoke to co-game directors Kurt Margenau and Anthony Newman about how the team rethought everything about combat and traversal to make Ellie feel different not only from Joel, but from the younger version of herself we played in the first game and its DLC.

The latest from the team that brought us I Am Setsuna, Octopath is hitting the Nintendo Switch exclusively on July 13, 2018. Find out everything you need to know about this ambitious RPG in our gameplay demo.

Ubisoft is asking fans to contribute art and music to its upcoming game Beyond Good and Evil 2, with the promise of monetary compensation if their work is chosen. Fans are already diving in with gusto, but critics quickly pointed out the issues with asking people to do work for only the possibility of payment.

One of the best things about Hitman was its episodic release. It encouraged players to replay the same level and find all its secrets while they waited for the next episode to be released. So why did the developer decide to drop it for the sequel?

Battlefield 5 has a massive Whale in it! A nice Easter Egg and new gameplay with feedback. What kind of game are DICE building here, and is 2D spotting too good? Let's discuss some problems with the game.

As one example of the type of post this rule is meant to prevent: earlier this week, one user claiming to be a historian posted a thread titled "calling me uneducated is the last straw" in response to EA COO Patrick Söderlund's statement that the backlash against women in Battlefield 5 "is not OK," and that the people criticizing the feasibility of women fighting on the frontlines of WWII "are uneducated." In a twist surely no one saw coming, the poster turned out not to be a historian, or to have gone to the school they claimed.

"The reason I chose that costume is because I'm a fan of American comic books. When you look at American comics, they're abandoning those classical costumes and becoming more functional, becoming more like fighters. They have certain materials they use for the costumes. I thought that was a wonderful idea and I wanted to follow that."

In Afterparty, you are Milo and Lola, recently deceased best buds who suddenly find themselves staring down an eternity in Hell. But there's a loophole: outdrink Satan and he'll grant you re-entry to Earth. Coming 2019.

One of the most beloved storylines in the Yakuza franchise's history has returned in full HD in the Dragon Engine for PlayStation®4. Yakuza Kiwami 2 features the return of mini games like Cabaret, a revamped clan creator and the original arcade release of Virtual-On™, Kazuma Kiryu will have plenty of leisure activities when he isn't taking on his fierce rival, the Dragon of Kansai, Ryuji Goda.

Never Alone was inspired - both a beautiful game and beautiful collaboration with Native Alaskans to show a culture we otherwise wouldn't see. It touched hearts, it won awards, and now creator E-Line Media is back with something new.

Sega has revealed the North American and European release date for Valkyria Chronicles 4. People will be able to pick it up on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on September 25, 2018.

We talk to Sam Lake, creative director of Remedy Games and face of Max Payne, about the studio's newly revealed supernatural shooter Control. The whole game takes place inside one mysterious building, which shifts and changes as you become more powerful.

Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Quantum Break have secured Remedy’s legacy as a cinematic game developer, not afraid to hoist story into the spotlight. Remedy's games are always backed up by unique mechanics that make its games stand out, even if they don’t always top the sales charts. This E3, Remedy debuted Control, a mishmash of supernatural conspiracies and government shadow agencies.

Yes, the new Command & Conquer game EA announced at E3 2018 is a free-to-play online only mobile game. This news is disappointing for fans of the classic RTS franchise who were hoping to get a brand new, fully-fledged PC C&C game. Even if the new mobile game, Command & Conquer Rivals, contains references and characters from the older games, this isn’t a traditional RTS game. But while Command & Conquer Rivals might not be the true sequel some fans have been wanting, it’s a surprisingly fun and tactical mobile game that feels inspired by Clash Royale and Star Wars: Force Arena.

Black Ops 4 developer Treyarch stopped by our E3 2018 stage to show off some gameplay and talk about the upcoming Call of Duty's multiplayer overhaul, as well as a quick conversation about its battle royale mode, Blackout.

If I had to name a favorite game of E3 2018 — I’m fickle and bad with favorites — I’d probably say Rage 2. I wrote yesterday that it plays like a mixtape of Bethesda’s portfolio, grafting some of the best bits from Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein and Elder Scrolls onto an open world first-person shooter. Unfortunately, Rage 2 retains the one thing I despised about its predecessor, something I worried would prevent me from really enjoying the sequel.

Get ready to fight off the zombie horde in the game that is based off the movie that was based off the book, World War Z. We chat with Oliver Hollis, Designer at Saber Interactive in this gameplay demo.

In this excerpt from The Game Informer Show podcast, Dan Greenawalt talks about Phil Spencer's announcement at E3 2018 that Microsoft is buying the developers behind Forza Horizon Playground Games. Remedy's Thomas Puha and the director of Ori and the Will of the Wisps Thomas Mahler also weigh in on the purchase.

On June 18th 2018, the International Classification of Diseases 11 (ICD-11) was published by the World Health Organisation. This diagnostic manual, currently only available to stakeholders for adaptation, has legitimised ‘Gaming Disorder’ as a mental health disorder. On the same day, a video was published on the World Health Organisation’s YouTube channel providing context for the controversial decision:

Might not be the most exciting story today, but this feels like a bit we need to cover. Last month, Telltale delayed The Wolf Among Us 2 until 2019 due to vague “we’re making it better we promise” reasons. This comes at the end of a year or two of reports that life at Telltale is not going well, and that the internal operations have become increasingly toxic. Kevin Bruner, who helped launch the company in 2004, started as chief technology officer before becoming CEO in January 2015, and was forced out last year. Now he’s suing Telltale for how his removal was handled. It’s pretty complicated.

There’s a dark cloud looming over Ubisoft’s Beyond Good and Evil 2, and I’m not just talking about the one in the stunning E3 trailer. Alongside a lot of good things at the E3 showing of the game was a section on how Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s HitRecord was going to be handling the inclusion of community-created art and assets for the game. While creators will be paid if their work is used, it still sounds like high-risk speculative work to me (spend time/money making stuff now, hope someone pays later), despite Gordon-Levitt’s woolly claim otherwise, posted on Medium here.

This week, Ubisoft announced that for Beyond Good and Evil 2, they'd be partnering with HitRecord to create art & music assets as part of a fan collaboration project to "build the universe" of their Nietzsche-named sequel.

I remain personally dedicated to the idea that Dan Floyd carved into stone all those years ago: “Because Games Matter”. Video games are the medium I built my life on and they’ll be the hill I die on, but in the same breath there are no Starks in Winterfell and there are no more Dans in EC.

The North American open qualifiers for the 2018 Dota 2 International were off to the races yesterday, with dozens of games being played to determine who would take a regional spot. And then along came a patch containing Dota 2's new battle royale mode, and everything fell apart.

In the third episode of this series we talk to the people who invested millions in Blizzard's vision for Overwatch League sight unseen, discussing the potential they see in esports, how they're committed to its growth, and the responsibilities they now have to their players.

But over the next couple of months, Larry began to sell better. It had the same mystique as Softporn, but it was easier to play, more visually interesting and had a sense of humor. About a year later, it cracked the Top 10 on the sales chart. The sales were driven by word-of-mouth and widespread pirating, which boosted awareness of the game. “So many people pirated [Larry],” Lowe says. “At one point we sold more hint books than copies of the game.”

It’s tempting to rewrite history and give myself some noble purpose for starting this hobby, but in this case the truth makes for a better story. My parents bought themselves an Apple //e when I was 10, and it quickly came to dominate my leisure time. Pirated software was rampant, and I idolized the crackers whose names I saw flash and scroll on the crack screens of the games I traded with my friends. I also admired the few who documented their methods in cracking tutorials, initially distributed as BBS text files and later collated and redistributed on disk. I PEEK’d and POKE’d and CALL’d many late nights as a teenager, but I could never quite put it all together.

A game developer friend of mine recently hired a translation agency to translate his latest game into Japanese. I offered to skim through it and make sure everything was okay… and it turned out to be a sheer disaster.

So I thought I’d write up a quick article for gamers and game developers who have dreams of releasing stuff in Japan someday.

The French creative aesthetic has always been a bit different from that of English-speaking nations. In their paintings, films, even furniture, the French often discard the stodgy literalism that is so characteristic of Anglo art in favor of something more attenuated, where impression becomes more important than objective reality. A French art film doesn’t come off as a complete non sequitur to Anglo eyes in the way that, say, a Bollywood or Egyptian production can. Yet the effect it creates is in its way much more disorienting: it seems on the surface to be something recognizable and predictable, but suddenly zigs where we expect it to zag. In particular, it may show disconcertingly little interest in the logic of plot, that central concern of Anglo film. What affects what and why is of far less interest to a filmmaker like, say, François Truffaut than the emotional affect of the whole.

While Markus, Rose, and Luther are all important characters in Detroit’s story, they only feel important because of how they can be used as shorthand symbols connecting to the real world. The problem with this allegorical approach is that it flattens the complexity and nuance of real-world experiences of black people who’ve lived under oppression. Cage and his co-creators haltingly implement scenarios of situational ethics in Detroit, but the moments where compassion or consideration win out are given short shrift. The shifting moral landscape of the game seems to exist only to justify a replay of cruelties visited on oppressed peoples. The choices we’ve had to make weren’t always easy binaries, and Detroit does little to speak to the psychological weight of having to make such decisions.

Kratos has used the same type of weapon for the last six God of War games. Now he’s using something completely different: the versatile, tactical, satisfying, and enjoyable new Leviathan Axe. In this video I look at what makes this weapon interesting, and how Sony Santa Monica came to design it.

If it weren't for some aggressive restructuring and a complete overhaul of the game, the second Dark Souls title (and the first Souls title to be directed by anyone other than Hidetaka Miyazaki) would have never seen the light of day.

Or else, Dark Souls 2 would have been so unpolished and broken that it could have destroyed developer From Software entirely.

In this excerpt from The Game Informer Show podcast, Ben Hanson speaks with the director of Hitman 2 Jacob Mikkelsen, Banjo-Kazooie's composer Grant Kirkhope, and the head of design at TT Games/Lego DC Super Villains Arthur Parsons about E3 2018 and much more.